The visuality of British Landscape painting in the tradition of such luminaries as Sir Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir John Constable have long provided viewers with a pastoral history of the British Landscape as an idealized and romantic one, free of the politics of the time and offering an aesthetic paradigm for the fabled “English countryside” that we know today. But the visual culture that produced those sweeping pastoral views, sometimes populated by wealthy white landowners, dressed in the finest garments of the time and enjoying leisure activities that were decidedly of the titled class. In fact, those sweeping views also contained nuanced messages pertaining to white ownership of that landscape, the right to surveil their own private property, and the centrality of the white body as both owner, and natural, and “neutral” inhabitant of that landscape.  

Using those same gestures as the centrality of the body occupying space, Jermaine Francis’ project obliges the viewer to reconsider who is considered a natural inhabitant of the British landscape. The history and the visualization of the landscape is about property and wealth, but embedded are deeper meanings alluding to a sense of belonging and ownership. This project situates the Black body within those landscapes with both an unflinching primacy as well as a natural ease. The participants of Francis’ photographs do not offer a reason to justify their position in the landscape: they have a right to occupy that space without explanation. This tension, as well as the lack of textual narrative accompanying the exhibition, challenges and invites the viewer to regard the Black body within the landscape as neutral and with agency; as being in harmony with and not as an anomaly to that landscape.  

A Storied Ground is on view through December 17 @ Galerie PCP 8 Rue Saint-Claude 75003